Nationhood, national identity and democracy: Australian Senate Inquiry

On 29 July 2019 the Senate referred the following matters to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee for inquiry and report by the last sitting day of May 2020:

Kevin Brennan

I have just two central yet unequivocal arenas of concern and action in relation to this Senate Inquiry 1. The paucity of real substance to the thing we like to call Australian Citizenship 2. The profoundly dystopian philosophical underpinnings of Australian Society today Up front, I summarise the point I am making relative to a Term of Reference and include along with the summary, the recommendation/s I see as fitting and appropriate. The pages following that are the detail – where I make and sustain my arguments. Nationhood, national identity and democracy, with particular reference to: a. the changing notions of nationhood, citizenship and modern notions of the nation state in the twenty first century; I submit that Australia’s nationhood and citizenship suffered “arrested development” because of our status as a ‘colony’ and a distant outpost of the then British Empire. As a result, the ‘founding documents’ necessary to mature nationhood were only partially developed resulting in the fact that we have a Constitution that does not properly serve the Australian people in the 21st century because it was never designed to do so; and that we DO NOT HAVE an appropriate people’s document that complements our Constitution and gives Australians the certainty of substantive citizenship and clearly articulated, universal rights and responsibilities apart from adjudication and legal argument by Courts. And this especially applies to Australia’s First Nations peoples. I further submit that, based on current analysis, Australia may be an independent nation but we are not truly sovereign because of this fundamental short-coming. RECOMMENDATIONS: Develop a People’s (or Citizen’s) Charter document as the second rail (or second wing) of our ‘ship of State’ to define citizenship and its scope and instruments and to enable and facilitate our mature nationhood standing as both independent and truly sovereign. b. rights and obligations of citizenship, including naturalisation and revocation, and the responsibility of the state to its citizens in both national and international law; I submit that professional analysis of the legal status of Australia and Australians indicates that the only ‘universal’ right Australians have is that if one is technically a ‘citizen’, one has the ‘right of abode’: the right to call Australia home. All other rights

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are non-universal and subject to adjudication and legal argument by Courts. And this is of particular significance to Australia’s First Nations peoples. RECOMMENDATIONS: Insert and embed a Charter of Rights and Responsibilities into the aforementioned People’s (or Citizen’s) Charter document; and include in that document clear lines of accountability responsibility, recourse and redress to provide the missing balance between government and the governed. This would include appropriate recognition of the prior claims of Australia’s First Nations peoples. c. social cohesion and cultural identity in the nation state; I submit 1) that Australia has many ‘histories’ which all depend on the biases and ‘angles’ the various protagonists come from; 2) that Australia has never really been ‘cohesive’ as to its sociology or its culture; 3) that the ‘cohesion’ we from time to time experience is usually around war, disaster or special events; 4) that Australia in the 21st century is now irretrievably un-cohesive, with cultural cohesion mostly limited to ethnic sub-groups, giving rise to the multi-Australia we now are. I further submit that the cultural cohesion claimed by certain personal interests are expressions of what I call the ‘blue barrel bear syndrome’ where ‘the world’ is what each sees painted on the inside of their particular blue (conservative) barrel like the bear that got its head stuck in one such barrel. RECOMMENDATIONS: Clear signals need to be given (and clear steps taken) by our elected governments to foster, encourage and broaden community debates on what it means to be Australia and Australian; and an important part of this is to undo the dystopian and retrograde steps taken in recent years that do the opposite (in particular those steps we have taken to criminalise whistleblowers and the criticism of governments. d. the role that globalisation and economic interdependence and economic development plays in forming or disrupting traditional notions of national identity; I submit that it is not hard to see from current UK goings-on that it is near impossible for “sovereign” governments or citizens to extricate themselves from what they considers inappropriate and/or unbalanced or discriminatory deals that have been forced on many nations as a direct result of the application of globalisation principles and, more precisely, the unfettered whims of global capital. National sovereignty is critically at stake because global corporations see themselves as the only legitimate form of ‘government’ when it comes to economic and national budget matters. This raises the critical question: does economic interdependence trump (pardon the pun) economic independence? I further submit that this is a debate we need to have at local community and non-professional- economist levels precisely because ‘economy’ literally means household, not simply budgets, accounting and finance. RECOMMENDATIONS: Balance the debate on these matters by a temporary silencing of global finance interests and amplifying citizen input to try to prize heads out of barrels. e. contemporary notions of cultural identity, multiculturalism and regionalism; I submit that Australia has a fairly robust arena of cultural identity and its propagation into the nation’s psyche; and I submit that this has tended to push those cultural identities into cohorts with somewhat rigid boundaries (thus enabling the multi-Australia I refer to). I further submit that a response to this has been that some rural and regional areas have decided to ‘join them’ rather than ‘beat them’, leading to the situation where rural and regional communities seek to establish themselves similarly to ethnic cohorts, thus increasing the number of ‘multi-Australia’ identities. I further submit that this is, in part, a flow-on from the paucity of substance to Australian citizenship and nationhood.

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RECOMMENDATIONS: Put substance into citizenship by means of citizen engagement in citizenship and nationhood debates, projects and enterprises – especially inclusive of First Nations peoples. f. the extent to which nation states balance domestic imperatives and sovereignty and international obligations; I submit that the main reason we have a problem here is that we have never put in place the founding documents necessary (never finished our nationhood project) and that we need desperately to do so. Globalised economy is insanity if it’s not coupled with globalised society (open borders) and globalised government (universal law and simultaneous policy). Without the latter two, the former is – as we now know all too well – disastrous for most and a cornucopia for the few. RECOMMENDATIONS: Re-nationalisation of important infrastructure and enterprises. g. comparison between Australian public debate and policy and international trends; I submit that, in this matter, White Australia has never graduated from primary school; and that our ‘school’ has predominantly been the ‘school of hard knocks’ with bullies in charge. I further submit that this is largely because of 1) our being, from conception through inception, a place for the landed gentry and their convict servants – always a divided place; and 2) our denial of the problem and our concomitant unwillingness to address it. [White Australia was riven with apartheid principles, yet we ignored that and put our efforts into fighting South African apartheid; today, we are an apartheid nation that refuses to be honest with itself.] RECOMMENDATIONS: Learn from South Africa and Germany (for example) and repent, forgive and include the excluded. Along with altered national ego, we should change our national anthem (fittingly) from “Advance Australia Fair (White)” to “I am, You are, We are Australian”. Implementing above recommendations helps this process. h. any other related matters. I submit that many of the sufferings of Australians currently – whether First Nations people or, like me, fourth- or fifth-generation born here – stem directly from (metaphorically) drinking from a poisoned well. The so-called economic principles Australia now works blindly and carelessly to are the principles established, consolidated and propagandized by psychopathic megalomaniacs; and in many instances – as I found out when I returned to university as a mature-age student – these principles are little more than the whims and wishes of the world’s rich elites and the academics who support them. I submit that everybody engaged in implementing these principles knows they do harm to the world’s citizens across the globe; they do harm to the citizens’ world; and they do harm to future generations. [For example, insisting that deficits are debts our children and grandchildren will have to pay back is patent nonsense, and economists know it (government deficits are private sector surpluses); it’s just not in their interests to unveil the truth – which I believe is the definition of obscurantism and obfuscation.] RECOMMENDATIONS: Get the economics theories right; get the economists reading the right textbooks and listening to the right people, not the Right People. Were we to become an actual sovereign nation, with a full set of founding documents, we could stand up in the world as an adult and become a beacon of sane and mature governance instead of being a child at play on a leash being led blithely along by a gaggle of neurotic plutocrats. What follows is detail and explanation around the above matters.

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THE PAUCITY OF SUBSTANCE TO AUSTRALIAN CITIZENSHIP I submit that citizenship is, properly and fundamentally, about choices, liberty and dignity. I further submit that choices, liberty and dignity are, in Australia in the 21st century, severely curtailed in – or rather simply missing from – the two pivotal arenas of economy and society. I submit that without substantive citizenship and a bedrock ‘social contract’ of decency and respect, people are little more than animals abandoned to the “Nature, red in tooth and claw” of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam. As phrases.org.uk notes, this poetic phrase is, “A reference to the sometimes violent natural world, in which predatory animals unsentimentally cover their teeth and claws with the blood of their prey as they kill and devour them.” [https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/red-in- tooth-and-claw.html] It’s what happens when competition becomes the main game. One White Australian history is a history of abandonment and survival. Another is a history of ravenous and rapacious Empire with scant regard for human welfare. Yet another is a history of perilous and fraught adventure, more like misadventure. Attempts at a civil life for White Australia have often been fighting a lost cause and a losing battle: you may win a skirmish, but overall, you lose the war. Not only has it been a battle against an unimaginably harsh natural environment, it has been a war of attrition on the original (black) inhabitants and custodians of this land and a struggle by the propertied class to maintain the privilege and status that was their perceived right as emissaries of Empire. At the time of the British Empire’s incursions into Australia, it was common and accepted practice among the European royal thrones that an application of the ‘Divine Right of Kings’ was that if a spot on earth came under the footstep of a King and he claimed that spot in the name of his crown and throne, that was “law” and could not legitimately be challenged. It amounted to louche law: rather nasty law, applied with a good dose of hubris. According to some literature on the subject (Politics in Australia by Drum and Tate for example), it comes under the heading of “Crown Prerogative Powers”: In Australia, there is only one exception to the doctrine that governments are subject to the rule of law, and no government action is above the law. The exception concerns the remnants of the Crown’s prerogative powers. The Westminster system evolved in the United Kingdom, over centuries, as a process whereby the Crown ... became increasingly subject to the authority of Parliament... But within the Westminster system, some powers remained in the possession of the monarch and were not rendered accountable to Parliament. Today these powers [are] known as prerogative powers of the Crown... William Blackstone described the prerogative powers as ‘those rights and capacities which the king enjoys alone ... and not ... those which he enjoys in common with any of his subjects’ (Blackstone 2010, 481). Similarly, Frederick Pollock wrote that: ‘Prerogative is nothing more mysterious than the residue of the King’s undefined powers after striking out those which have been taken away by legislation or fallen into deseutude’ (Pollock 2010, 481). Today, these prerogative powers include the capacity of executive governments to make treaties with other sovereign states or declare war upon them (Blackshield & Williams 2010, 482-3). The reason why such prerogative powers are above the rule of law is that they are not dependent for their validity on laws passed by Parliament, and the courts claim to have no jurisdiction over them. So, for instance, the Howard Government did not need to pass a law through Parliament to

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declare war on Iraq in March 2003, and no citizen of Australia could bring the Howard Government to court for declaration of war. (Drum & Tate 2012, 175) In ‘shorthand’, PM John Howard acted as if he were king by making use of “Crown Prerogative Powers”. The same is true of the representatives of the British Crown who erected the Union Jack on Australian soil, declared it ‘Terra Nullius’ and claimed it for the British Crown. And there was no law – still is no law – to prevent or invalidate such actions. We often call such behaviour ‘leadership’. But neither is Australia a truly sovereign state. The same Drum and Tate work (p. 342) deals with this under a section heading titled “Legal independence versus sovereignty” in chapter 14: “Sovereignty refers to more than simply legal independence”. And I stress the words more than. Legal independence is contained within sovereignty; sovereignty is not, by default or definition, contained with legal independence. Legal independence, as it exists in Australia, is the sole and exclusive right of the Commonwealth and state parliaments and governments to legislate and exercise executive authority within their respective jurisdictions as set out in the Australian Constitution. Sovereignty, on the other hand, refers to a nation-state’s own self- determining capacity – the fact this it is not in any way dependent for its existence, independence or authority on another power, but rather autonomous, in the sense that such independence arises from its own sources alone. According to political scientist David Held, sovereignty is by definition absolute and, therefore, inconsistent with any wider dependencies on foreign powers, because it requires that ‘there is no final and absolute authority above and beyond the sovereign state’ (Held 1989, 216). Consequently, while Australia’s legal independence is consistent with such independence arising from a series of statutes passed by the UK Parliament at Westminster, limiting the UK Parliament’s authority to legislate in Australian affairs, sovereignty is not. In order for sovereignty to exist, a state must be completely self- determining and not dependent for its sovereignty on the authority, statutory or otherwise, of another power. Such is the case with the Unites States of America, whose independence ... arose from a revolutionary break from Great Britain, and whose constitution, beginning ‘We the People’, indicates that any legislative executive or judicial authority that is exercised at a national level, within the American system of government, arises from the sovereign capacity of the American people alone. This is not the case in Australia. As the High Court makes clear ... any ‘sovereignty’ we allegedly possess as a nation-state arises largely as a result of UK statutes. However, as Drum and Tate point out, “... no UK Parliament can exercise its sovereignty to limit the sovereignty of future UK Parliaments...” (p. 343). Therefore, the UK retains in perpetuity the power and authority – via its Parliament of the day – to amend or revoke any of its legislation or statutes, including the Statute of Westminster and the Australia Constitution Act. However much we like to think otherwise, Australia is not a true sovereign state. I submit that we need to become one forthwith. Most Australians like to think we are “we the people” but we might as well be saying “we the pumpkins” for all the good it does us. We may have legal independence but we are scarily short on sovereignty. The principle reason for that is that we have but one founding document, and, on the one hand it is not designed for use by a truly sovereign state but rather a ‘Colonial Law’ state; and, on the other hand, it is a document well suited to a Colonial Law state in regard to administration, defence and trade. It is not by any means a ‘People’s Document’ – nor was it designed to be such.

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By way of analogy, I would like to draw on a piece of railway history – an invention. The Brennan (don’t think I’m related!) or Gyro Monorail. The website listverse.com as of this date has this invention as number 7 in its list of weird trains. Powered by electricity, the Brennan monorail was invented by Louis Brennan in the early 20th century. We might call it the motorcycle of the train world because it had a single set of wheels and ran on a single track. It did not tip over even when it stopped. Two gyroscopes stabilized the train to such a degree that the train would probably remain upright and continue moving on the ground if it derailed. In fact, Brennan invented the monorail to replace regular trains that often derailed whenever they tried to take curves at high speed. But that’s true only if the gyroscopes worked correctly. Unfortunately for Brennan, his monorail never replaced regular trains because the failure of even one gyroscope would cause the train to derail and crash violently. In addition, the train was not cost-effective because it could not pull other coaches. Australia is a metaphorical iteration of the Brennan Monorail. As another Brennan, I submit that Australia needs to supplement our monorail+gyroscope approach to nationhood and give ourselves the second rail our ‘ship of state’ needs to run on. Our monorail polity was never designed for true national sovereignty; it cannot deliver it; it keeps crashing because it is not ‘fit-for-purpose’; and its twin ‘gyroscopes’ are now antiques and they are regularly failing at the same time. The two gyroscopes are ‘economy’ and ‘society’.  The thinking that gave us “It’s the economy stupid” (a variation of a catchphrase from the Clinton US Presidential campaign of 1992) and “good economic policy is good social policy” (one of former Federal Treasurer Peter Costello’s campaign mantras) grossly prioritises economic management: it over-stresses the money aspect of both our private lives and our public life – our national psyche.  What shows up in the debates around Australia’s “social contract” and the famous line from Margaret Thatcher that “There’s no such thing as society, only individuals and families” (Women’s Own magazine, October 31, 1987) focuses on social responsibility, but only in the course of an exponential diminution of the idea of society within both our private lives and our public life – our national psyche. What Australia’s ‘monorail’ polity demonstrates is that we are far more likely than not to calibrate the social gyroscope to settings that match ‘there’s no such thing as society’ (which means it has diminishing interest in it); and calibrate the economic gyroscope to micro- manage unemployment, inflation and interest rates – and therefore the daily lives of pretty much every citizen. This is then sold to the electorate (note, usually not ‘citizens’ – we really don’t like using that term to refer to our populace) as “getting the fundamentals right” and “sound economic management” which ‘Progressives’ fail at and ‘Conservatives’ excel at “in a canter”. This is an iteration of the definitional problem we have with the word ‘us’. However, in a dual-rail system, economy and society are two sides of the one coin we call citizenship. The Greek word that gave us the word ‘economy’ (oikonomia) actually means ‘household’ and encompasses both economy as we know it, society as we know it, and much more besides – the integrated nature of all human life and its myriad connections to the rest

Senate Inquiry Submission | Kevin Brennan | September 2019: Page 6 of 26 of the world we live in. This gives rise to a note on two seemingly disconnected topics to follow: Ayn Rand; and the Real World. People are, first and foremost, citizens; it’s part of our DNA that, at least to me, differentiates us from other animals and life forms. We participate in society as citizens; we participate in economy as citizens. But we are not the slaves of either; rather both serve the citizen. Therefore we have a mutual obligation to mitigate the harmful incursions of ‘economic management’ and ‘social control’ and keep them at arm'’s length from ourselves and from each other. It’s part of our social responsibility. Antithetically, we are not raw animals ‘red in tooth and claw’; neither are we here to be cogs in the gigantic machine dystopia of commerce and industry. As sociology clearly shows us, we have near unlimited capacity for altruism and perhaps we might say we are here to co- exist and co-operate ‘for the good of all’. Individualism as a way of life is extinctual – it leans towards extinction (as a built-in bias) via internicine wars of attrition; and competition – one of our many addictions – turbo-charges the conflicts.  Ayn Rand: I can count on one hand the number of people I have ever heard refer to or quote Ayn Rand. Yet her ideas lie at the heart of many of the seemingly less toxic grenades we delight in hurling at one another across the globe: the poor and the weak are “refuse” and “parasites” and those who help them ‘survive’ are reprobate, stupid, moronic or all three. In her “objectivist” utopia, selfishness is not just good, it is the one true course; altruism is evil; and things like compassion, care and empathy are a destructive waste of time. The poor ‘deserve’ to die (they are “the undeserving”) and the rich deserve to be rewarded with laissez- faire (unmitigated) power (they are “the deserving”). This echoes Herbert Spencer’s thinking in his Principles of Biology (1863) that is a key pillar of the religion of Neoliberalism – and particularly Neoliberal Economics (or Economic Rationalism as it was originally known). The hard, “tough love”, “behavioural poverty” extremists of politics have succeeded in a spectacular array of incursions into economy and society: witness the utter insanity of “mutual obligation” (which is anything but mutual: ‘enforced volunteering’ is free labour and/or slave labour); the perpetual surveillance of ALL individuals in receipt of a commonwealth pension or benefit payment; and the following quotes from one Tony Abbott as a Minister in the first Howard Government (taken from correspondence and media releases at the time):  This 2001 budget week will show that the Howard Government is as keen to tackle the moral deficit as the budget deficit a) “if you need help, you have a moral deficit” – social stigmatisation and social irresponsibility on Abbott’s part; b) budget deficits equal the private sector surpluses we need to keep things moving – economic ignorance on Abbott’s part.  You have a besetting reluctance to accept personal responsibility for anything Neither Abbott nor the Howard Government more generally, has ever accepted responsibility for the devastating consequences of their actions in withdrawing funding, slashing the public sector and driving down wages – all depressing economic activity and causing social dislocation. They claim credit for ‘creating jobs’ when by their own admission they don’t believe in job creation, instead they “leave it to the market” as Abbott wrote; but they never claim credit for the job losses their actions cause.

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 You are participating in self-defeating behaviours Abbott’s actions as a Minister precipitated his own defeat; I wonder if it ever occurred to him that he was ‘participating in self-defeating behaviours’ – yet he wasn’t surveilled to anxiety and depression or denied an income because of it.  Hand-outs are no benefit to those willing to contribute This belies two characteristics common to harsh Conservatives: 1) they haven’t a clue “how the other half lives” and don’t want to know; 2) they are driven and motivated more by louche ideology than by empathy – since empathy is weakness. Psychopathic tendencies.  There are all sorts of realistic alternatives available to you The trouble with all his ‘alternatives’ was (and remains) that none of them were paying jobs and most were opportunities for unpaid labour – involuntary ‘volunteering’.  The solution is ‘pragmatic personalism’ That’s one of the many reflections of Rand’s “Objectivism” and is a personal construct of the Minister who opted to force it on the whole cohort of citizens who needed his help.  Human dignity is not conferred by government but won by people’s own actions Human dignity a) is innate (no matter how much we like to think and teach otherwise); and b) is specifically not ‘earned’ as if it depends on nice moral behaviour that suits the preacher. All these statements mesh beautifully with Ayn Rand. While they may be popular in some circles, they insist that citizens believe and live by gross and damaging untruths about our nature as human beings. Only seriously wounded people teach stuff like this. Richard Flanagan in The Guardian of 22 August 2019 makes an observation that we are “a nation where the worst routinely rule” and emits a sentiment that “little if anything has changed with our Conservative rulers over the last half-century.” I agree – but I submit that it is in large part because we are a nation only half-formed; with ‘arrested development’; and with little idea about how we got here or what to do next. MP Andrew Wilkie, commenting on the deepening shadow of journalistic repression shrouding Australian life in 2019, has tapped into a widespread disquiet when he says, “We’ll wake up one day and wonder how ... we got here.” Making matters much worse, we discard the good things our citizens say and do that might heal our malevolence and harshness with each other. In 1977, the Myers report was rejected and discarded before the nation saw it – in large part because it recommended precisely what the Conservatives of the time did not want to hear.  The ‘real world’: what is the ‘real world’? More precisely: which world is the ‘real world’? The world we have created for ourselves has succumbed to its own propaganda and advertising. We talk about a real-world education as an education that is constructed around and pointed sharply towards the things we presently value. When that changes, we reorient our education, even when our values system is dystopian. However, huge numbers of the things we have and value we could do without and we would not necessarily become extinct. There are two main clutches of things essential to life: one I call the ‘human birthright’; the other is the web of relationships we are born into, including our relationship with the natural world and its processes.

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The ‘human birthright’ consists of five things: air, sunshine, water, soil and seed. However, without insects for example, seeds probably won’t germinate and produce food. So the human birthright cannot be separated from the web of relationships we are born into. Within both of these, some things are visible to the naked eye, others are only visible with a magnifying instrument of some sort and some are invisible, or more accurately, intangible. Some of the tangible/visible things we live with are the direct result of things that are intangible. Food we cook for dinner is obviously tangible; electricity to cook it is intangible thought its infrastructure is not. Wood for fire fuel is the result of invisible, intangible processes we only have minimal control over. But what man has done on this planet is introduce a whole other world of things that appear tangible but are actually intellectual constructs. Instead of cooperating with other humans for mutual benefit within our web of relationships, many of us compete for dominance and superiority. In the course of that, we seek to control the elements of our birthright and selfishly influence the web of relationships for personal advantage and gain. Markets – not the physical infrastructure of buildings etc. but the idea – have been invented and imposed on the five elements of the human birthright. And at the core of this is not ‘the good of all’ or ‘the common good’ but to advantage those in control of the ideas. Often, the motivation behind it is fear: there might not be enough for everybody, so selfishness kicks in to ensure dominance, resulting in ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. This is a popular (yet dystopian) definition of success. And selfishness is the central key feature of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of “Objectivism”: as above, selfishness is a virtue and altruism is evil. Which of these ‘worlds’ is the real world? These days, each individual decides that for him/her self. In order to navigate through the complicated mess we now call daily life, we have constructed more and more phantom objects and now we have to call the world we have built the ‘real world’ otherwise none of it would make any sense. At the same time, we have failed miserably to protect the human birthright and the web of relationships we actually live in from predation; we have marketised and monetised them; the air we breathe has been divided up into flight paths and severely polluted and depleted of oxygen; sunlight is interrupted by any number of agencies, from clouds of pollution to high-rise buildings, mostly for personal profit; the surface of the earth has been surveyed, fenced and sold for profit; our waterways have been signed over to corporations and used for the disposal of waste; viable seed is ‘copyrighted’ over to corporations and sold for profit to the exclusion of any who can’t or won’t pay for their Trademark. The ‘enclosure’ and subsequent marketisation of most aspecta of life only serves the purposes of those who have the wit and the power to impose their selfishness on all and assert their superiority simply by virtue of the fact that they’ve been able to “succeed”, yet they have the temerity to call it ‘the real world’. See The Politics of the Common Good by Jane Goodall.

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Obscurantism has a clear and unequivocal meaning: the practice of deliberately preventing the facts from becoming known – whether or not one likes or believes the facts in question; ‘reality’, on the other hand, is entirely in the eye of the beholder; it is personal and equivocal. The movie The Corporation highlights the dominant (corporate) view that things have to be privately owned to be “valued” and “protected”. Yet their ‘valuing’ and ‘protection’ is for corporate gain and to safeguard share-value while denying free access to our common birthright. Markets, businesses, corporations, legal instruments, financial instruments, and a plethora of other things are all intellectual constructs that are only necessary because we have made them so; and for the furtherance of the ends of their creators, not the common good. That’s why psychopathy is highest among corporate CEOs and the lawyer-politicians who back them. Yet all these things are vacuous and vapid – and if they were no longer available, we would be forced back to the position of recognising the worth, the value and the rights of every person and our common birthright. Australian citizenship, I submit, has become one such thing. It has lost its connection to the worth, the value and the rights of the individual. Though I’m not sure – Australia being an outpost of rapacious empire – that her ‘citizenship’ has ever had such thoughts, meanings or applications. It is just a hollow intellectual construct of space part-filled with the hot air of legal argument and law enforcement. It is vacuous and vapid. It is a potential space, filled with hot air, marketed as a golden egg, yet laid by a god-like dodo.

The old adages we keep hearing are that it “has served us well” and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ – and they are both serious cases of obfuscation and obscurantism. First, it has only ‘served us well’ if by ‘us’ we mean that it has well and truly taken care of the ‘acceptable and deserving’ cohort and kept the ‘unacceptable and undeserving’ in their place. That’s the Conservatism that lies at the heart of Australian political history and the Objectivism of our current Conservatives. It’s done its job well in that regard. Therefore, some will say it has served us well; others will just as surely say it is has not served us well; both are correct statements. It was neither designed nor implemented to benefit all. Australia’s Constitution is not a People’s Document and makes no attempt to define

Senate Inquiry Submission | Kevin Brennan | September 2019: Page 10 of 26 citizenship or make it in any way substantive, inclusive or generative; it’s designed to assert who is “in” and who is “out” – who comes and who goes. Second, and in the same vein, for some Australians, “It’s an oldie but a goodie”; while for others, it’s a dinosaur – it’s a sickle in the age of the combine harvester; hence the perpetual tension and contention, from White proclamation to now, between Conservative and Progressive. I submit that the real question for Australia and for Australians is whether we need to be kind to ourselves and give ourselves a dual rail system that makes gyroscopes as redundant as we have made many of our people in our monorail system. In place of gyroscopes trying to balance a monorail system, I propose an auto-pilot technology for a dual-rail system, and that auto-pilot technology – and this is by no means a ‘new’ idea – is Full Employment as both the central nervous system and the guidance system of our polity and our nationhood. We’ve done it before; we can do it again. The corporate world of business and finance and law is a cluster of unreal worlds we have to live with; the real world is the world of those excluded from the things fenced in by corporate enclosure, elitism and entitlement. The human birthright is almost totally thwarted by corporate Objectivism: selfishness and greed. And the web of relationships we are born into is tested to breaking point on a daily basis across the globe. Wars are the all-too-common result; but wars are good for the economy – yet not so good for society. Living a common life is passé and oh so last century. The system we foster and perpetuate has failed the world’s citizens while making global ‘successes’, superstars and sensations of the most damaged psychopaths we have managed to produce. As we speak, Australia is going through the throes – and reeling from the consequences – of four national “inquiries”, and they are all around severe abuse of otherwise powerless people: child abuse; elder abuse; customer abuse; home-owner abuse. The thought of what comes next is terrifying. What is common to these? a) the psychopathy of our leadership and b) the absence of any rights-based citizen protections that can be relied upon without recourse to lawyers and courts. Which leads right into a central point of my submission: it has been well established by Constitutional lawyer-scholars that citizenship in Australia is a hollow egg and ‘rights’ are entirely unremarkable and only sustained by legal/court proceedings and expensive legal argument. A Bit of (Different) History Here’s a couple of documents Australian citizens probably need to know at least a little bit about: 1. An Australian Citizenship Excerpt from the Melbourne University Law Review [Vol 37:736ff]: “The Rights and Responsibilities of Australian Citizenship: a Legislative Analysis” by Sangeetha Pillai; 2. From the Sydney Law Review [Vol 30: 132ff] “Still Call Australia Home: The Constitution and the Citizen’s Right of Abode” by Helen Irving. A more detailed analysis of these sources is covered in my work elsewhere. The major points are these:

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In relation to Source 1 above:  “... legal protection is not always equal for all citizens, calling into question the notion of equality between citizens alluded to in the Preamble to the ACA [Australian Citizenship Act] 2007.” [1: p.740]  “It has been well noted that the Australian Constitution makes no direct reference to a national citizenship. The Constitution does not define a class of people with an entitlement to hold the status of Australian citizenship, prescribe the rights that flow from holding such a status, or even confer a clear power upon Parliament to define citizenship through legislation.” [1: p.741] Emphasis added.  “Today, the legislative concept of Australian citizenship is enshrined in the ACA 2007.” [1: p.741]  “In Australia ... a person’s citizenship status is of great practical importance when determining the extent of their rights... However, this is rarely the result of the clear codification of citizenship rights in statute.  “In the absence of any clear delineation of the consequences that flow from citizenship in the ACA 2007, it is necessary to look to other pieces of Commonwealth legislation to determine the nature of citizenship rights and obligations.” [1: p.751]  “Rubenstein’s 2002 work [Australian Citizenship Law in Context] illustrates that a global look at citizenship-based discrimination in Commonwealth statutes does not generate a clear list of citizenship rights and obligations. Most statutory rights and obligations do not hinge upon citizenship status, and where statutes do discriminate on the basis of citizenship there is no ‘consistent basis’ for this discrimination.” [1: p.751]  “Moreover, rights ... do not always extend equally to all citizens. To an extent, this differs from the treatment that rights in [similar] categories are afforded internationally.” [1: p.752]  “Other countries empower Parliament to determine who will hold citizenship through statute, but constitutionally protect against the deprivation of citizenship for some or all citizens. The Australian Constitution, by contrast, is silent on Australian citizenship and, accordingly, does not provide any express status protection for Australian citizens. The acquisition and loss of Australian citizenship are dealt with entirely under the ACA 2007.” [1: p.752-3] Typically, Australia wants to practise political extremism at home while maintaining rage against the extremism of “the usual suspects” nominated by the United States of America. 2019 is unveiling our deep duplicity and social cohesion is unravelling as a result. Any nation that makes lies its refuge will come unstuck. In Australian Citizenship Law in Context, (2002:209) Kim Rubenstein makes the point that Australia really has no ‘list’ of citizenship rights or obligations. This is incredibly convenient for ideologues with an agenda for Australian business (read “economy”) but not for Australian society – since ‘there is no such thing as society’. And such ideologues have dominated Australian politics since the 1970s. Our Constitution was written as the founding document for Federation in 1901. At that time, and for some time hence, we were British subjects, with no need of documented rights, responsibilities, allegiance affirmations and so on. We were Australian British – or British Australian, depending on your point of view. For the most part, Australians are just as likely to be asked, ‘Are you an Australian Resident?’ as they are to be asked, ‘Are you an Australian Citizen?’ I am fourth generation born here and I still am uncertain how to answer these questions. The reason for my

Senate Inquiry Submission | Kevin Brennan | September 2019: Page 12 of 26 uncertainty: there is no definition of and there is no substance to Australian citizenship. It has always puzzled me that people who come here from another place and gain ‘citizenship’ get a citizenship certificate, yet I have to be content with a birth certificate. And even then, I don’t get an original; I get a copy of an extract of a birth entry – which has to be certified by a Justice of the Peace to be accepted as valid. I still find the whole thing unfathomably absurd. But even more absurd, in my view, is that any attempt to right the unright – to negate the neglect – is met with forceful and fearsome resistance as if one is hell-bent on trashing the aspiration and hope of another, when we just want a better deal for all. In relation to Source 2 above:  It is generally assumed that the Australian Parliament has the power to make laws regarding citizenship and that s. 51 of the Constitution (notably para. xix) is sufficient. However, even though this would probably be invoked today if a relevant matter came up for adjudication, its foundation is actually in what are called obiter dicta: incidental remarks. One dictionary defines an obiter dictum this way: “a judge’s expression of opinion uttered in court or in a written judgement, but not essential to the decision and therefore not legally binding as a precedent.” [2. p.136-7]  Australian courts are known to adopt “the now settled position that it is for the Parliament, relying upon para (xix) of s 51 of the Constitution, to create and define the concept of Australian citizenship” (Koroitamana v Commonwealth (2006) 227 CLR 31 at 46 [48]).  Apparently it is still not a legally binding agreement. However, Irving points out that, “McHugh J also identified the power over citizenship as an inherent attribute of Australia’s national sovereignty.” [2. p.137] But there’s that word ‘sovereign’.  “... while citizenship is a necessary criterion for the enjoyment of some rights in Australia (such as the right to vote or to stand for Parliament), it is in almost all cases not sufficient. The rights that might appear to define citizenship are routinely denied to classes of citizen.” [2. p.138]  “Voting is an essential part of the representative democracy established by the Constitution and it presumably could not be abolished altogether. However, a citizen’s right to vote is not protected by the Commonwealth Constitution.” [2. p.139]  “Other rights we might imagine to be ‘citizens’ rights’ are no more constitutionally secure than the franchise.” [2. p.140]  “A citizen may be denied a passport on the exercise of executive discretion.” [2. p.140]  “Citizens are not constitutionally protected from extradition.” [2. p.140]  “The Constitution does not protect citizenship or prevent legislative deprivation of citizenship.” [2. p.140] Moving to Irving’s conclusion:  “To source a constitutional concept of citizenship in the Constitution’s references to ‘the people’, or even specifically ‘the people of the Commonwealth’ is to suggest that citizenship is defined by attributes that the Constitution either does not guarantee to all citizens, or that apply to aliens as well as citizens. It does not assist in our search for the content of the constitutional concept. The alternative sources of power — the aliens and immigration powers — provide us with a definition that is both conceptually satisfactory and supported by case law. It is a definition of the citizen as a person who, having acquired citizenship according to law, has the right to live in Australia.” [2. p.152]

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 “... many of the rights one might imagine to give content to a definition of citizenship have already been subject to legitimate legislative derogation, and this has, in a number of cases, found support in constitutional jurisprudence.” [2. p.153]  “However, if my analysis is correct, we can identify at least one core (or ‘connotative’) right or definitional criterion of citizenship already lying in the Constitution. This is the right of abode in Australia. Whether this should be made express in the Constitution will depend, in part at least, on whether it is considered normatively desirable to confine the right of abode to citizens, leaving aliens susceptible to exclusion or expulsion. That is a much larger question.” [2. p.153] If you have acquired Australian citizenship legally, you have the right to live here! The rest is subject to disputation and the good-will of the courts, including the High Court. Nothing is clear; nothing is settled; nothing is unqualified; nothing is quantified; nothing is stipulated; nothing is certain – except uncertainty. And given the ferocity of objections to any attempt to close the gap – and the obfuscations around those objections – one has to wonder if that was not (and maybe still is) the plan. “Keeping the rabble in line” has an extremely long history as the chief and highest duty of “government”; next to ‘keeping us safe’ and ‘keeping the peace’. Making things clear, settled, unqualified and certain might lead to “citizens” knowing what they want and exerting their individual sovereignty to acquire it. Furthermore, trying to change our Constitution to make it do things it was never designed to do is manifestly fraught in every conceivable way and does not serve the nation well. A good test of the authenticity of any ‘flavour’ or ‘colour’ government is its willingness to stand with and for its citizens, not against them as an oppositional force. Therefore ...  Make citizenship substantive, inclusive and generative; by specifying and legislating what it contains;  Include it – along with national Indigenous recognition and a Treaty – and a charter of rights and responsibilities in a second “Founding Document” (a people’s Charter) to run parallel to the Australian Constitution: the second rail, so to speak.

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THE DYSTOPIAN UNDERPINNINGS OF AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY I submit that our somewhat incestuous and rather profligate relationship with the United States of America has surely delivered to us a range of symptoms that now can best be described as a syndrome. Fundamentally, we have taken on board huge amounts of American political and business culture minus the rights and constitutional underpinnings the USA has in place. For example: rich equals successful. Metaphorically, we have been infected with the USA virus without having either any vaccination against the dire effects of that virus or knowledge of and access to its antidote. What our system is spitting out for us is, on the one hand, incongruent with much of Australian social and economic history and, on the other hand, corrosive in the extreme of the storehouse of much smarter ideas resident within and among Australian citizens, who are, in the American Way, benched on the sidelines unless they have rich parents. I learnt some years ago that you “cannot partner with an American”; if they put in money, they OWN it, OWN the entire process, and OWN the construction of the relevant founding documents involved. I suspect the ANZUS “Treaty” is one such process: they OWN us. I submit that the first thing Australia needs to do – especially in this particular era of history with a Potus Insanitus on the empire’s throne – is review the ANZUS treaty to ascertain how many paragraphs and clauses contain toxic capitulations to US imperialism and either renegotiate it or bin it and start afresh. As I have shown earlier, Australia may be independent, but it is not truly sovereign as a result of our own no-deal ‘AUSexit’ from the United Kingdom. A similarly inadequate and diminutive relationship with the USA on the one hand makes us vulnerable to foreign incursions which could easily overwhelm our paltry systems and jettison us to God knows where and, on the other hand, bind us terminally, without any protections at all, to the words American empire is known to deliver throughout the world. I submit that the USA is a “true and great friend” to the extent that it benefits the USA financially; we are just another ‘market’ of ‘consumers’ for their products and services and they will as surely take them over as the sun rises tomorrow. They already use Australia in the sense that power abuses the relatively powerless unless laws and policing are in place to mitigate that; and Australia has a wide reputation as a lackey of the USA. It is this principal piece of invisible ‘architecture’ that has allowed – even aided – the development of deeply sour and corrosive philosophies to surreptitiously develop and take root here. Seemingly out of ignorance, we created a vacuum and had no power to stop truly dystopian ideas flooding in to fill that space. And this is against the backdrop of Australian citizens having much better ideas but being sidelined – benched – by our lust for all things American. For instance, American binary simpleness says that if a thing is not capitalist, then it is communist – or at best, socialist – and that is by default “bad” for everybody. In this ‘binary simpleness’, we do not live in a decimal system or a base-100 system (except for counting or hoarding US$): there are no numbers apart from or between one and zero. Hence a thing is either present or not present; true or not true. And in terms of percentages, this system says there are no percentages between zero and one hundred: there is no 50/50 or 70/30; there is “all or nothing”. One of the clear manifestations of this in public administration is the idea that governments either create all money or none of it. Hence, if governments create ‘some’ money (without using debt issued by private banks), they are to that extent publicly claimed to be either ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’. This binary simpleness is hellishly corrosive and destructive of what we call society’; but if “there is no such thing as society”, no argument can be mounted against it.

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This has been switched to ‘turbo’ mode on various occasions by the outworking of the principle I identified earlier from Richard Flanagan: ‘the worst routinely rule’. The most glaring evidence I find of this principle at work has led me to elsewhere propose that all federal government departments should be subject to a protocol where they cannot be named “Department of ...” or “Department for ...” but simply the “... Department”. The reason being that, consistently throughout our history, vast amounts of energy and money have been expended working against the various portfolios, not for them. At many points in our public administration (and this is in my Master’s thesis) our flip-flopping between Conservative and Progressive (or really just ‘less Conservative’) politics and Parties, what we have done is flip-flopped between “Department for/of” and “Department against.” The (former) Department of Social Security evidently became the Department of Social Insecurity; the Department of Education became the Department against Education; the Department of Primary Industries became the Department against Primary Producers; the Department of Health became the Department for Drug Companies. This is just one example of a routine practice some journalists have written up as “governing against government”; governments are elected on a (hidden) platform or agenda of ‘dismantling’ government to as great a degree as possible in their term of government. This is standard practice mong US Republicans and, at times, UK Tories, and we are misled into believing 1) that this is somehow helpful for Australia; 2) that it is ‘good for us’ regardless of whether it is so or not; and 3) that this represents ‘good government’. The history of “Economic Rationalism” in Australia is a case in point. In Australia, a certain suite of doctrines was generally referred to as Economic Rationalism – our version of the Mont Pèlerin Society’s Economic Fundamentalism. In 1991 Michael Pusey wrote “Economic Rationalism in Canberra” – the term seems to have emanated from that work. In the Sydney Morning Herald of 17 October 1991, Pusey defined economic rationalism in this way: Economic rationalism is the dogma which says that markets and money can always do everything better than governments, bureaucracies and the law. There’s no point in political debate because all this just generates more insoluble conflicts. Forget about history and forget about national identity, culture and ‘society’ ... Don’t even think about public policy, national goals or nation-building. It’s all futile. Just get out of the way and let prices and market forces deliver their own economically rational solution. The “forget about history” phrase is tones of Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History” published in The National Interest journal. For Fukuyama, this new ‘consensus’ quite probably signals the end of “humanity’s socio-cultural evolution” and represents the “final form of human government”; otherwise known as “the end of history”. Hence statements like “It’s the economy stupid”; and if there is no such thing as society, people do not live in society, so there is really only individuals and families (à la Thatcher); and they have to work like crazy to ensure they don’t end up in the class of people whose only real purpose in life becomes service of the economy – or, more specifically, global corporate profits and share value. This whole scenario is hugely analogous to a well trodden medical pathway for many humans: we participate in an array of seemingly unavoidable choices that lead inexorably to a ‘destination’ (a diagnosis) we do not want and did not knowingly choose – a chronic disease of some sort. It’s not that hard to look back over time and see those critical points of choice

Senate Inquiry Submission | Kevin Brennan | September 2019: Page 16 of 26 and our reasons for choosing them at the time. Although it might now be too late for us, we might attempt to ‘educate’ our children to ‘beware the gremlin’. A diagnosis of metastatic disease or stage-four cancer will, most likely, cause us to kind of retrace our steps to locate points of disease departure (mutations), to understand them and perhaps undo them or maybe mitigate their deadly unravelling. Or, to switch analogy for a moment, in some cow paddocks, you cannot avoid stepping in cow-shit because there’s just so much of it. But having all those cows in one place is never questioned; it’s just assumed that that is the way it gets done and stepping in cow-shit is inevitable and unavoidable. Australia has created its own cow-shit-fest (or metastatic disease) because it imbibed some of the world’s most hideous, corrosive, dystopian ideas in an ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time’ kind of way. This has resulted in the creation of an Australia that so many do not want to live in. Hence we have massive break-down in social cohesion and demonstrations against a long list of things by our up-coming generations; often supported by grey-hairs who have spent their whole life trying to warn about the cow-shit (the metastatic disease) outcomes of our directions and decisions. Smart people; with good ideas; benched by the US and the other global finance interests we prefer to listen to. We may not be able to hold back the personal ravages of the disease so many of us are caught up in; but we can at least identify the departure points (mutations) and attempt to speak and live another life, based on a more honest and circumspect view of the world and our part in it. Here’s a few of those hideous departure points (mutations): All-against-all competition Thomas Hobbes – a favourite of many 21st century Conservatives – has led us up a dry creek bed. Stephen Law in the DK Eyewitness Companions Series’ Philosophy, notes that Hobbes (in Leviathan of 1651) “imagines a “state of nature” that is the situation prior to the formation of society, in which each person pursues their own self-interest: a state in which each of us is at war with everyone else.” (p. 275) (Bellum omnium contra omnes.) Hobbes goes on to say, “Everyone would clearly be better off if they cooperated, so it must be rational for each of us to curtail our freedom and follow laws, so long as we can rely on everyone else to do the same.” This is the root of “social contract” theory and has given us “rule of law” concepts. Yet clearly we cannot “rely on everyone else” to curtail their freedom and follow the same laws. There are multiple suites of laws to suit the proclivities of the various ‘classes’ or tribes; and those suites of laws are in conflict at many (and random) points. This very evidently delivers us inevitable “winners and losers” and most often “winner takes all”. Hobbes is counted among the philosophical “Atomists” and “held that the world consists exclusively of material particles in motion arguing that non-material substance ... is self- contradictory.” The mind, the imagination, abstract thought, sensation, motivation, aversions, appetites, etc. can be explained in terms of motion in the body. He maintained that there is no such thing as a spiritual substance; everything is entirely mechanistic. On the other hand, Margaret Heffernan makes a coherent and compelling argument in A Bigger Prize: Why competition isn’t everything and how we do better: It regularly produces what we don’t want; and we fail miserably at seeking out or implementing sound and responsible alternatives such as creative collaboration and cooperative enterprise. And often the main reason is, such things rarely add to corporate profits or share value.

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Let the failures fail This is the imaginary world of Ayn Rand devotees like Rick Santelli; Glen Beck; Senator Rand Paul; Walter Wriston; Rush Limbaugh; Newt Gingrich; Alan Greenspan; C. Jesse Duke; Grover Norquist; the Koch brothers; Ed Meese; Richard Viguerie; Ted Nugent. Unfortunately, the imaginary world these people live in has become “the real world” we are all told, by these self-proclaimed high-priests, we must live in. The idea that they could be wrong totally eludes them; their evident “success” – defined by them – proves both their worthiness and their right whatever they choose. It was the combined effect of WWI, the Great Depression, then WWII that led to the conclusion that capitalism is a dud. To persist with it means we have to justify, explain and execute a paradigm and suite of policies that feeds Empire and starves ‘earth community’. That’s the way of the kingdom of man – the way of Empire – since we adopted Self and The Market as our gods, and the ravenous pursuit of Self within Markets as virtuous lifestyle. The great lie of human history is that since there’s not enough for everybody, some have to be excluded and it might as well be those who have no power to change the system or fight back: “let the failures fail”. The lie gives birth to fear; which issues into mass death by starvation, disease and war while those with power use it to protect themselves and provision their future. Thomas Frank in Pity the Billionaire puts it this way, under the subhead, “We the market”: And what it sold is the great god Market. If only Americans would return to the paths of mercantile righteousness, we were told, the market’s invisible hand would lift the threat of “destruction” from then land. It would restore fairness to a nation laid waste by cronyism and bailouts. It would let the failures fail, while comforting the thrifty and the diligent. Under its benevolent gaze, rewards would be proportionate to effort; the lazy and the deceiving would be turned away empty-handed, and once again would justice and stability prevail. And when it was tested, it failed at every single point in Frank’s description. Principally, the very people advocating “let the failures fail” did not let the failures fail but propped them up with money stolen from the have-nots. It seems these wonderful “christians” took Jesus’ words (out of context) as a doctrine to be followed. Behavioural poverty A classic argument here comes from beliefs around ancient and traditional “Sacred Cow” thinking where cattle are considered sacred, their slaughter is prohibited and the consumption of their meat taboo. Critics of this belief system maintain that the people who practise this belief become – and stay – poor because of the behavioural choices to not exploit cattle for food and related “market” activities. Another basis for mounting this argument comes from Æsop’s fable of The Grasshopper and the Ants. Oli Kangas’ 2000 SPRC-UNSW paper “The Grasshopper and the Ants: Popular Opinions of Just Distribution in Australia and Finland” notes: In the story about the Grasshopper and the Ants, the morality or concept of justice revolves around desert and lack of desert. In principle, the story presents two different concepts of just distribution. According to Ants, the end result – the miserable situation of the Grasshopper – is perfectly fair. The Grasshopper is entirely responsible for her actions. “What were you doing with yourself all last summer? Why didn’t you collect a store of food for the winter? Because of this responsibility, the end

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state is a result of the Grasshopper’s own conduct alone... And vice versa, the prosperity of the Ants is due only to their sacrifices, cleverness and hard work. They do not have any obligation towards the poor Grasshopper. It was this thinking that gave rise to the structure and culture of Centrelink as we know it today; at least in part because it was also what drove former Minister and PM Tony Abbott’s philosophical machinations identified earlier. Survival of the fittest; dog-eat-dog; “nature red in tooth and claw” Around 2,000 year ago, apostle Paul (whom I consider a philosopher of note) raised an argument that, one way or another, we are all ‘without excuse’ before God. He was not being condemnatory; rather he was being quite the opposite. He saw that 1) God was both just and the justifier of all mankind; 2) as such, no-one was without excuse before him in order that no-one can claim superiority and all are justified on the same basis and in the same way; and 3) so that he can justly have mercy on all mankind equally and without exception. Paul specifically identified several pre-existing cohorts of humans in his letter to the Romans; one such cohort is people “who suppress the truth in their unrighteousness”. What may be known about God is evident around them, but in their hubris – and their ‘wisdom’ – they reject that and become ‘fools’ as Paul put it. The consequence of that is an overwhelming stupor that pushes them to ‘exchange truth for lies’ and create their own “real world”. Like Hobbes, while deep in their hearts they know that “Everyone would clearly be better off if they cooperated”, they ‘invent new forms of evil’ as Paul puts it – like how to practise ‘survival of the fittest’ and make it the “real world” because it suits their predilections. Kill-or-be-killed; eat-or-be-eaten At the heart of this idea is that mankind is nothing more than another species of animal. The central trouble with this idea is that it is not universal. Virtually every human civilisation or culture has its own ‘creation’ story in which humans are ‘special’ or ‘other’ relative to the rest of the world around them. And it does appear that humans are unique in all of nature in our innate habit of thinking and caring deeply about this. However we got to this place and condition, humans are not predominantly instinctual; many other forms of life appear to be. The idea of Darwinian inter-species evolution, it appears, is unique to humans and very, very recent. If evolution – biological and cultural/sociological as many insist – is true, it is highly likely we will ‘evolve’ to a point of realising that the idea of evolution was an immature phase and subsequent generations will consider it rather obtuse for a wide range of reasons. I consider evolution a pathetic excuse for bad behaviour. We use it to justify the notion that ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’ applies to humans equally with all other forms of life; that we are just another expression of, as Hobbes put it, “exclusively material particles in motion”. Sociology teaches us otherwise. We still consider people with homicidal – even suicidal – ideation and motivations as having a mental illness; being ‘sick’; and being aberrations from the norm. ‘Kill or be killed’ may serve population control, but it devalues each human on the planet and devalues their labours whether they are labours of love or just grinding labour. Trample the weak; hurdle the dead This is a Ted Nugent speciality. The Washington Times, 24 June, 2010: Analysis/Opinion. Right from the beginning of his diatribe, Nugent assumes that his understanding and definition of ‘political correctness’ is universal – or at least it should be. Such hubris!

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In a world of spineless, humorless political correctness, I suppose I could translate the title of my new love song and 2010 tour for the creatively challenged out there, and am certain it will make for some good reading. And a big hunk of his hubris is ignorance – whether accidental or intentional: I am not a schooled economist, but I am an economic pragmatist. I do not believe the average American, of which I am one, requires an Ivy League economics degree to understand basic economic truisms. One of the most fundamental economic truisms is that raising taxes and increasing government spending historically leads to economic calamities, while cutting taxes and slashing government spending generally ignites an economic firestorm. Amazingly enough, it does not appear to me that anyone in the Obama administration understands this most basic economic reality. Perhaps they just understand that that is a manufactured and unreal ‘reality’ that certain members of US Administration and many citizens live in; part of which ‘reality’ is to denigrate those who see things otherwise. He claims what he is saying “[is] not fear-mongering, folks. It is a reality born of economic pragmatism.” And what does Uncle Ted actually think; what does his ‘real world’ look like? Come November, I’d highly recommend that America does like Uncle Ted: Trample the weak, hurdle the dead. How many Ted Nugents could the USA tolerate before dollars would be so thin, none of them would survive. And what would Uncle Ted do then? Would he be trampled and hurdled like all the other ‘failures’? Herbert Spencer Consistent with the evolutionary theory of the day, and along with Hobbes, Spencer wrote in his Principles of Biology in 1863: The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many ‘in shallows and in miseries,’ are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence. It seems hard that an unskilfulness which with all his efforts he cannot overcome, should entail hunger upon the artisan. It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence – the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children of diseased parents, and singles out the low-spirited, the intemperate, and the debilitated as the victims of an epidemic. Ayn Rand George Monbiot, in “How Ayn Rand became the new right’s version of Marx” (The Guardian 5 March, 2012), writes that “Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed”; where “The poor die like flies as a result of government programmes and their own sloth and fecklessness”; where “Those who try to help them are gassed” – like the “teacher who taught children to be team players” or the “mother married to a civil servant who cared for her children” or the “housewife who believed that she had the right to elect politicians.”

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While this is all couched in a fictitious story (Atlas Shrugged), both Rand and her acolytes attempted to live the manufactured ‘reality’ of Objectivism and many so-called leaders in the US today still do. Such attempts include pushes from within and among the rich class for no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulation, no income tax; along with mocking compassion and empathy and attacking efforts to make the world a kinder place. Ironically, it is reported that towards the end of her life, Rand signed on to both Medicare and Social Security. Monbiot puts it well: “Her belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill health.” Monbiot goes on to note, “It’s not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires...” while: It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would suffer grievously from a withdrawal of government. But such is the degree of misinformation which saturates this movement and so prevalent in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality and expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as billionaires’ doormats. And one very large billionaires’ doormat is Conservative Australia today; all with the end result that citizens with deficits of money or power are forced into the ... Play or die logic of Empire Clearly a man of “Earth Community” and not empire, David Korten writes well about Empire’s ‘play or die’ manufactured reality in The Great Turning from the People-centred Development Forum 2006: The gradual transition from monarchy to political democracy during the last half of the second millennium stimulated a corresponding transition from imperial rule by the power of the sword to imperial rule by the power of money. The new rulers donned business suits rather than the imperial robes and embraced more subtle tactics as they deftly circumvented the democratic challenge to their power and privilege. The transition began with the rise of the European nation-states in the aftermath of the Middle Ages. Of a mind to expand their imperial dominion while minimizing the prospect of direct military confrontation with their powerful neighbors, they projected their expansionist ambitions outward to the far reaches of the planet to triumph over weaker states. Rather than turn to loyal generals as their agents of imperial conquest, they issued commissions to swashbuckling adventurers, licensed pirates and chartered corporations that functioned as officially sanctioned criminal syndicates working for their own account under an imperial franchise. British kings issued corporate charters primarily as a means to create income streams not subject to democratic oversight by the nobles of the early British parliament. Contemporary publicly traded corporations carry forward the mantle of the Crown corporations of an earlier day. The largest now wield more economic and political power than most contemporary nation-states and continue to serve as institutional vehicles by which the propertied class circumvents the institutions of democratic accountability. The money system, however, is an even more powerful and successful weapon than the corporation in the war of the ruling class against middle- and lower-income working classes. By controlling the creation and allocation of money, the ruling class maintains near total control over the lives of ordinary people and the resources of the planet. Empire, in the guise of democracy, remains alive and well. True democracy remains an essential but elusive ideal. As we need to confront the reality of the imperial legacy, so too we must confront the limitations of the democratic experiment. To that

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end let us now turn to an earlier effort to break free from the play-or-die logic of Empire. I submit that Australians should be more worried about the diminution of our politics and ‘democracy’ from these home-spun yet toxic, dysfunctional and sociopathic ideas than from interference by China, Russia or Rwanda. They are noxious weeds that need uprooting. In any kind of ‘democracy’, the nominated government is supposed to ‘govern for all’, not for the cohort/s that voted for them. It is expected that the government given the Crown’s commission to govern will not legislate to reinforce social stereotypes based on unsubstan- tiated and derogatory myths and thereby run fellow-citizens into hopelessness and poverty out of neglect or spite. I submit that, in 2019, this is now happening routinely; so we do not live in a democracy of any sort, ‘representative’ or otherwise; we live in an oligarchy (rule by elite) – albeit an ‘elective’ oligarchy. The clearest and safest course to root out the dominant dystopian and destructive dogmas is to end the persecution of citizens who see the world differently and establish a rights-based régime for citizens to appeal to in the event of evidently vindictive or punitive administrative decisions. By this means, governing for all Australians can be re-established; the alternative is illiberal, punitive despotism. A citizens’ charter embedded as a parallel document to the Constitution would serve that purpose well. A charter of rights would be one spoke of a number radiating out from the hub of ‘full employment’. The one thing hard ‘Liberals’ campaign so fiercely on for themselves – the ‘'liberty’ of self- determination – is the very thing they want to deny to the people they disapprove of. Why? They want a monochrome lifestyle-set where difference is shunned and facing up to the deficiencies in their beliefs is a bridge too far. Postscript: Within 24 hours of completing the draft of this submission, this new item is reported in The Guardian Australia: “Death and destruction: this is David Koch’s sad legacy” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/27/death-destruction-david-koch- legacy This piece by Alex Kotch is a perfect adjunct to my submission as it summarises and highlights the points of disease departure – the mutations – in our politico-economics. Australia is only a few short steps from the anarcho-capitalism of the Koch brothers and their colleagues; and there is little-to-nothing standing in its way – primarily because, as we see in Koch, the same people are driving the rapacious corporate greed as are driving our ‘governing against government’ out-of-control train. It’s plutocratic oligarchy pretending to be democracy and doing a very bad job of it. Kotch – rightly and fairly – variously describes the dominant hegemony as a cancer, a cult and “the faithful worship of the divine free market”. I call it a religion where the literal (original) meaning of the word is paramount: the re-enslavement of otherwise free people. A couple of paragraphs from Kotch’s article make the point well: This is the tragic mindset of many a rightwing oligarch: ‘The toils, the woes, the maladies of humankind are irrelevant – unless they happen to me, or perhaps my close family members. I’ve never struggled to live on $7.25 per hour, so why is it a problem? An ailment has never caused me to go bankrupt, so why would anyone possibly need government subsidies to pay for life-saving medical care? Climate change has never directly affected my life so I’ll keep on denying that humans have

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anything to do with it. Even though I inherited a business and a fortune, I earned every cent of my astronomical net worth. If you worked as hard as I have, you would have what I have, too.’ This mindset, apart from being psychopathic, is illogical and irrational on so many levels. Far from the least of its stupidities is the idea that everyone (anyone) who wants to can be as filthy rich as they are:  The world cannot sustain even one Koch Brothers, let alone 3 billion of them;  They would not have a single cent, either by inheritance or by “hard work”, were it not for the rest of the world supporting their ventures with their labour and their hard- earned money;  Clearly their profit margins are stratospherically above reasonable and pollution is not a cost to business but to society;  We already have billions working far harder than the Kock Brothers and the system is not working for them – why not?;  They live the delusion that the global economy is not a kind of zero-sum game – every billion they accrue is a billion lost to the labour-hire class without the protection of State interventions. Then Kotch adds: It is this cruel mindset that was the real cancer plaguing David Koch. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would spread itself into university curricula, the halls of Congress, regulatory agencies, and the White House. It possessed the unfathomably rich who came before him, and it will infect the opulent oligarchs who come after him. It is the cult of anarcho-capitalism, the faithful worship of the divine free market that has shined so brightly on Koch and his family. If only we could do away with government altogether, we’d become a true utopian society: a handful of corporate monarchs ruling over billions of wretched serfs who toil away until their deaths, faithfully adding zeros to the quarterly revenues of the select few at their own fatal expense.

Such is the history of the Mont Pèlerin Society that has spawned so many corruptions of human dignity around the globe since its inception. Few economics textbooks – with one notable exception – stray very far from the dogmas and mantras of Rand, Spencer, von Mises and Friedman; and most current economic theory (note, for example, Ted Nugent’s home- spun ‘economic pragmatism’ earlier) reinforces 1) the multi-genesis-theory that some people groups are neither animal nor human (Australian and North American first nations people for example – at times called “subbies” meaning sub-humans); and 2) the theories of eugenics and social evolutionary natural selection (such as referring to citizens as weak, losers, failures, dullards, unfit, undeserving, unacceptable, etc.) This mindset appears to be a particularly caustic combination of Ayn Rand and Herbert Spencer. And while it might be the natural outworking of the earlier notion that “the worst routinely rule”, we do not have to leave things in this parlous state. [If the RBA is casting about for “unconventional” policy ideas, this submission – and my submission to the Senate Inquiry into Newstart etc. – are serious contenders.] Kotch identifies key areas where Koch Brothers’ money was spent and any inquiry into political interference in Australia’s ‘democracy’ is nothing but fairy-floss and obscurantism if it doesn’t inquire into their “fund[ing] of climate change denialism, stiff-arming scientists in order to further plunder the earth he was destroying” and their funding of and participation in “a network of free-market thinktanks that produced academic literature in support of slashing taxes and gutting regulations in order to aid mega-corporations like Koch Industries. These

Senate Inquiry Submission | Kevin Brennan | September 2019: Page 23 of 26 ideological centers include the Cato Institute, which the Kochs founded and where David was a longtime board member; the American Enterprise Institute, where he was a member of its National Council; George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies; and the Heritage Foundation. Now alumni of the Koch academic and policy network have become government administrators, regulatory officials, political advisers and lifetime judges.” A recent episode of a UK spoof-politics comedy series “The Thick of it” is called “Spinners and Losers”. It followed an episode titled “Rise of the Nutters”. What anarcho-capitalism vividly displays is precisely that: first, the rise of the nutters; followed by spinners and losers. And if we in Australia do not want an ever-increasing pool of excluded “losers” in the national economy, we have to quarantine the nutters and the spinners, put them in a sealed crate, and start listening to the right people – not the Right People. Australia needs a bold program of naming, denouncing and rejecting the ideas and the ways of the Neoliberalist religion and its priests and acolytes. Their harm to the planet and its citizens is already well documented and failure to so act is an atrocious act of abuse and neglect of the bulk of the citizens of the world who remain powerless to effect change. Apostle Paul was absolutely right: “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Old Israel’s prophet Ezekiel got it right when he penned the first (original) definition of sodomy: it is not homosexual behaviour, but rather – speaking God’s own words translated into English – “This was the guilt [the ‘sin’] of … Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” And Jesus got it right when he said, “…whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they think they have will be taken from them.” He was not talking about money; he was talking about understanding and hearing/listening. His opening words were, “Consider carefully how you listen [hear]…” Many religious people (Christians included) don’t want to hear; they only want to judge people for not measuring up to their pharisaic standards. We have no business setting public policy that makes virtues out of the love of money, the pursuit of selfishness, the quarantining or siloing of productivity and prosperity, the exclusion of those we don’t approve of, obfuscation and obscurantism, willful and selective ‘deafness’, so-called ‘tough-love’ (it’s an oxymoron), hubris, exploitation, greed, etc. Yet this is precisely what we have done as we have listened to the rich and powerful (as if that defines success) and failed to listen to the ones who should be the first to be heard when making public policy: those who will be affected by said policy. As long as we have no Citizens’ Charter, this will continue. Perhaps that is how the plutocratic oligarchs want it – and they are certain they deserve it; which delivers to us institutionalized ‘sodomy’: the profligacy of Sodom in the 21st century. I submit that if so-called elected governments want to ban and punish their citizens for criticizing them, they should first ban and punish themselves for criticizing their citizens. To not do so is to act like the “nutters” of Jesus’ day whom he labeled “white-washed tombs” because they heaped intolerable burdens on their people but wouldn’t lift a finger to help. White Australia has been pharisaical from the start; we have never had universal citizens’ rights; only onerous responsibilities. Yet when one raises the issue, we are told ‘It’s not about rights, it’s about responsibilities.’ It seems that ‘responsibility’ only really applies to hoi poloi, not to those who make the rules. The findings of the banking Royal Commission – and subsequent paltry ‘reform’ of the sector is a classic exemplar of this attitude.

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True sovereignty Were we to become an actual sovereign nation, with a full set of founding documents, we could stand up in the world as an adult and become a beacon of sane and mature governance instead of being a child at play on a leash being led blithely along by a gaggle of neurotic plutocrats. Such a shift can be easily understood by imagining a shift from a national anthem of “Advance Australia Fair” (meaning White) to “I am; You are; We are Australian”. It portrays a shift from childhood to adulthood and, in the words of David Korten (whom we would do well to listen to), from Empire to Earth Community. And for us to do that, a ‘people’s document’ of some sort is an absolute necessity to form the second rail (or second wing) of our Ship of State. Thank you.

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References: Blackshied, T and Williams, G 2010, Australian Constitutional Law and Theory: Commentary and Materials, Federation Press, Annandale Blackstone, W, Commentaries on the Laws of England 1765-1769, cited in Blackshied, T and Williams, G 2010, Australian Constitutional Law and Theory: Commentary and Materials, Federation Press, Annandale Drum, Martin and Tate, John William 2012, J W: Politics in Australia, Palgrave Macmillan Frank, Thomas 2012, Pity the Billionaire, Vintage Books London Goodall, Jane R. 2019, The Politics of the Common Good, Newsouth Sydney Heffernan, Margaret 2014: A Bigger Prize, Simon & Shuster Held, David 1989, Political Theory and the Modern State: Essays on State, Power and Democracy, Polity Cambridge. Irving, Helen 2008, “Still Call Australia Home: The Constitution and the Citizen’s Right of Abode”, Sydney Law Review [Vol 30: 132ff] Kangas, Oli 2000, “The Grasshopper and the Ants: Popular Opinions of Just Distribution in Australia and Finland”, Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales Korten, David C. 2006 The Great Turning, People-centred Development Forum Law, Stephen 2007, Philosophy in the DK Eyewitness Companions series, Dorling Kindersley Limited, London Pillai, Sangeetha 2013-14, An Australian Citizenship Excerpt: “The Rights and Responsibilities of Australian Citizenship: a Legislative Analysis”, Melbourne University Law Review [Vol 37:736ff] Pollock,F 2010 ‘Editorial Note’, Law Quarterly Review, 34, 1918 p. 159 cited in Blackshied, T and Williams, G 2010, Australian Constitutional Law and Theory: Commentary and Materials, Federation Press, Annandale Rubenstein, Kim 2002 Australian Citizenship Law in Context, Lawbook Sydney

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